When Asus sent the N550 to Vulture Central, I sent it back: the wrong model had been dispatched. Having seen so many tiresome comments following El Reg laptop reviews along the lines of “when I saw it was only 1366 x 768 I stopped reading”, I wasn’t going to proceed with this spec - and with more than these moans as …

Re: Tray-loading optical drive?

Re: Tray-loading optical drive?

A fubar upgrade of OSX on a slot loading macbook put me off them for life. Wouldn't complete the upgrade, and kept rebooting, seeing the disk and trying to run the upgrade again. Refused to obey the eject key and my universal cd-rom ejection tool (paperclip) could not save me. Took almost a day to get the damn disk out.

Re: Tray-loading optical drive?

When faced with a similar problem recently I did a quick bit of Googling and found that holding the option key at startup brings up a screen allowing you to select the startup volume. The eject key works from there.

Off the shelf laptops

Re: Mandatory

Regrettably, 16:10 displays are extinct on laptops outside the Macbook pro. It's annoying as I find 16:9 to be a horrible aspect ratio for working (all width, no height), but there you are. The reason is simply that 16:10 displays are more expensive to produce and none of the manufacturers (apart from Apple) seem to think they're worth it, even on a high-end laptop.

A pity. If a company like Lenovo could make a nice, 16:10 laptop with a 1920x1200 matte screen, 256GB SSD and decent keyboard/trackpad (with buttons), I'd buy one now - even for £1,000+.

Re: Off the shelf laptops

Re: Mandatory

"1920x1080 or 1920x1200... I really wonder who would see the difference."

1920x1080 is the HDTV 16:9 format. It is hard to buy a standalone monitor now in 1920x1200. Presumably the bulk production of 1920x1080 panels for TVs has produced an economy of scale.

A free-standing 1920x1200 monitor plays HD content with black bands above and below - useful for parking the player's on-screen controls. If you have 1920x1200 on a laptop then you will have those same bands effectively reducing your picture size for a given screen height.

Re: I really wonder who would see the difference.

Many many people. 16:9 is great for watching DVDs and a pain in the ass for anything else. 1920x1200 is 16:10, the difference seems small but it is a great deal better for most work tasks. As for RAM, you don't use VMs do you. If you did you'd know there is no such thing as too much RAM.

Re: No VGA port?

Re: Mandatory

1080 is not quite tall enough to display an A4 page at 100% zoom using Word 2011, so I guess 1200 might just do the job. 1440 would be better. Similarly large Excel sheets like tall screens, you can see more data without scrolling.

Re: Mandatory

Perhaps it's commonly referred to as 16:10 instead of 8:5 because the former is more easily contrasted with 16:9? As anyone with a clue knows though you could of course just refer to the latter as 8:4.5.

Re: No VGA port?

Re: No VGA port? Whynot VGA?

I give presentations to a lot of companies through out the country and most of them use a VGA connect to a projector. This is a cheap AND reliable way to show data. With no VGA connect This makes it far less useful.

Re: No VGA port? Whynot VGA?

The previous version (which I have) has both VGA and HDMI out, but in any case I have adaptors for both HDMI-> DVI and HDMI->VGA. Given the size of the power supplies on these things (i7 with 16G of RAM does use a few watts) an adaptor or two makes no odds.

Re: Mandatory

> you could of course just refer to the latter as 8:4.5

Of course not, as anyone with a cousin with half a clue could have told you that you just reduce the fraction to its lowest integer terms. That's just how you describe formats, otherwise there's no reason to use fractions in the first place.

Re: Mandatory

Re: I really wonder who would see the difference.

"you'd know there is no such thing as too much RAM" - indeed! I regularly run _programs_ that swallow up several GB. I actually use a laptop as a real computer, so I can work without having to sit at a desk.

Track pad alignment

The track pad looks like it is actually centred on the main keyboard, but the numeric keypad to the side makes that be 'not-centred' to the whole laptop and therefore screen. For touch typing that may be a good thing, but without trying it I couldn't say where would be best (in my subjective opinion). Oh, also an adaptable Left-hander.

but yes, why is it so difficult to find a laptop with a better than HD screen? HD is for television, not computing!

Re: Track pad alignment

To be honest, the first thing I do on a laptop with a touch pad is turn the damn thing off... if I'm actually using it while travelling, fair enough, but if there's anywhere to roll a mouse, even my knee, that's generally preferable.

A touch pad that just did straightforward things like tracking my finger, with a marked area for a click, is usable; these days they seem to decide that random touches from your palm are intended as complex clicks and anything can happen.

Re: Track pad alignment

Could not live without a trackpad now .. then again I use a Macbook Pro and that trackpad has a tendency to just work as expected. However on a 'work' Lenovo I would agree the trackpad should be taken out and shot .. the nipple rules on that one.

Re: Track pad alignment

"A touch pad that just did straightforward things like tracking my finger, with a marked area for a click, is usable; these days they seem to decide that random touches from your palm are intended as complex clicks and anything can happen."

Several linux GUIs (at least) have options to disable trackpad input while keys are being typed, specifically to deal with this kind of issue. I'm surprised this isn't standard in Windows.

Also Mandatory

Re: Also Mandatory

A note to UI designers

Stop designing interfaces to the audio/video hardware that look like something coming out of a soldering shop that received mechanical dials and random analog hardware from a B-52 yard sale, glued it together and plastered made-up and trademarked logos everywhere on the resulting box. That kind of old-style hardware was designed not because it was kewl but because there was no other way.

It gets even worse when the flexibility of a computer-interface is added in at random points (Do you hear, Amarok designer? Yes, get rid of your shitty volume control button first, then get rid of the rest of your shit too.)

I bought my son the pre-haswell version of this.....

Not a bad machine, looks quite good, nice screen and sound.

Has the usual PC laptop issues though, the battery is poor, the standard SATA drive is very slow, had to put in an SSD and the top bends when you're using it so the track pad gets spurious data and zaps your mouse pointer all over the screen at random forcing you to use an external one.

For its price it's not a bad machine but I think it illustrates the benefit of spending a bit more and getting something with a more solid chassis.